The Situation

For many years, Duane Reade was the leading drug chain in the New York City metropolitan market. Some of Duane Reade’s stores were the highest volume per door drug stores in the entire country because of their high traffic locations. Yet Duane Reade in the mid 2000’s was hemorrhaging top-line sales due to the encroachment of competitors and their relatively poor customer shopping experience.

The Solution

Analysis identified several opportunities for the chain to improve its consumer sales, retail partnerships and customer loyalty. The new program developed for the chain included a re-launch of the chains customer loyalty program, an improved partnership initiative with the chains major vendors and an integrated, store level execution regimen developed to work specifically with the chains’ low wage/low skill employees.

The Results

In less than 2 years, the following results were accomplished:

• The chains “front of store”,  same store sales comps went from an industry worst -2% to an industry best +7%
• $100 million in new business was driven through the customer loyalty program – the vast majority of those sales came from a new legion of “best and newly loyal” shoppers
• The chains leading supplier – P&G saw a $10 million increase in sales through the chain from enhanced partnership programs
• Store level compliance with display, signage and loyalty program initiatives was well over 90%
• Duane Reade’s fortunes were entirely reversed and it was soon purchased by Walgreens which (unlike any of its other acquisitions) left many of the chains programs in place post acquisition

While these accomplishments were team efforts, Michael Roth led the overall client engagement with a specific emphasis on analysis, driving store level and retail partnership execution.